How to use the Internet: A beginner's guide

If the great social networks are communities and even nations and blogs represent the individual voice, then online groups represent tribes and clans, smaller elements within the larger community all with their own distinct ranges of interest, functions and purposes. Groups can be public accommodating all who seek to join, or they can be private requiring an administrator or chief to grant access only after some sort of initiation has demonstrated the new member has enough in common with the group to join. Groups exist for every imaginable interest or human endeavor from Star Wars or other science fiction fans to bloggers or other professionals who might use a group as a simple online means of communicating and brainstorming about future projects. In fact, there are probably as many uses for online groups as there are people and groups of people who use them. And if you can't find a group with a task or mission that suits you, you can create one of your own. Big online portals like Yahoo! and MSN provide online groups and social networks like MySpace and LinkedIn do too. Shucks, even Squidoo has a variety of groups created for a variety of topics. Perhaps someday you'll have one too.

MySpace and , Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster, the social networks are the giants of today's online world and the natural successors of the great online portals like Yahoo! or MSN. Though they are massive in the traffic they control and the audience they serve, they crackle with the sound of millions of individual voices, individual users who are no longer the passive consumers of a gigantic corporately owned mass media, but participants in an ongoing global conversation and in millions of tiny individual but potentially equally global conversations as well. If blogs are the individual voices of the new media, social networks are vast communities, like cities or nations, containing within each thousands or millions of like minded tribes sharing interests, passions and even common goals. From politics to religion, business to music and the arts, social networks help those of like interests connect in a way never before thought possible. They allow for a communication that is both interactive and far reaching. New specialized social networks like YouTube, Flickr and Musicane allow users to share not only simple written communication but an ever wider range of content including video, photos and sound files. Networks as varied as MySpace and Virb now allow the sharing of a wide variety of multimedia content as well.